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For the reasonable price of $25,000 you can be the first in your neighborhood to own your very own cupcake car. $25,000? I spent less money on my truck, an actual vehicle that is street legal. Who would spend $25,000 on a cupcake car? Who sits around watching the Today Show with $25,000 burning a hole in their pocket? Apparently I am not the target market for the cupcake car; if I were, I would be ordering one right now instead of complaining about people who buy them.
That’s really all this is: a complaint. It’s not even a complaint for some holier-than-thou reason; it’s a complaint because I don’t have $25,000 to spend on a cupcake car. It would be easy to complain that $25,000 cupcake cars may be one of the reasons other countries aren’t terribly fond of America. It would also be easy to complain about the existence of a $25,000 cupcake car when a sixth of the world’s population would just like a normal cupcake to help appease their hunger. I could complain about the cupcake car using those lenses but that would just come from a false sense of righteousness; when I first look at the cupcake car, I’m not upset about the world’s hungry, I’m upset because I want one and I can’t have it.
I hate that initial feeling, the envy and greed that poor over me when I see something I want yet don’t have the means to attain. I don’t even know what I would do with a cupcake car but the fact that someone could spend $25,000 on one makes me envious and makes me want one. I know that it’s unreasonable, but my immediate gut reaction is to want what I can’t have. Only after I run through a gamut of selfish emotions, do I try to cover up my selfishness with self-righteous reasons for being upset about the cupcake car.
Maybe it is progress that I can even think beyond my own selfish reasons for why something like the cupcake car upsets me. In the past I would have been blinded by envy and sulked the entire day because I had to travel like a normal person. Now, I’m blinded by envy for a few minutes until I think of a better, more acceptable reason to be upset. I truly do think it’s terrible that anyone would invest $25,000 in something so useless while a billion people don’t have enough to eat. I only hope, though, that someday my first response will be some sort of holy discontent, not the wholly envious response I have right now.
How do you cover up your responses with more socially acceptable ones?
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